When we last touched base with Vancouver BC-based
Newrange Gold Corp. (
TSX-V.NRG,
OTCMKTS: NRGOF,
Forum) and their President & CEO Bob Archer
back in June, the company had just posted drill results at its Pamlico Project in Nevada that had caused a lot of excitement. Fast forward six months and the company has made a significant acquisition in Ontario plus new discoveries at Pamlico.
Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined, once again by Mr. Archer to get our investor audience up-to-date with all things Newrange Gold, primarily its recent Argosy Gold Mine acquisition in northwestern Ontario.
(Click image to play video)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH:So first off, for our Stockhouse metals & mining investor audience that might’ve missed our first video podcast, can you give us a bit of background about yourself and Newrange Gold?
BA: I'm a geologist by training, been in this business for just over 40 years and spent the first 15 years with majors like Newmont, Placer Dome and so on - a good part of that in Northern Ontario and Quebec, which is kind of relevant to where we're working now. Then a little bit farther on in 2001, I got involved with the junior company which ultimately became Cangold, and I became the President & CEO of that. At that time we actually acquired first an option and then bought out the Argosy Gold mine. So I oversaw the drilling that was done on the property from 2002 to 2004 but then in 2004, I was a co-founder of Great Panther which at the time was Great Panther Silver then became Great Panther Mining.
I built that up through to 2017 as a producing company with silver mines in Mexico, one under development in Peru and then later a gold mine in production in Brazil as well. Then shortly after stepping down as CEO from Great Panther I joined the board of Newrange in March of 2018 and then a little under a year later, in 2019, in January, I started as CEO for the company and just recently in October of this year took on the role of president as well. So increasing responsibilities for Newrange and expanding the company and Newrange was just a one project company when I first got involved in Nevada and now, we have projects in Ontario as well. So growing the company and it is good to be back to my exploration roots, as much fun as mining was for a while but yeah, back to my technical roots, so to speak.
SH:As I briefly mentioned in the intro, can you talk about the recent excitement around the past-producing, high-grade Argosy Gold Mine acquisition in northwestern Ontario?
BA: Sure. Well as I mentioned, Dave I personally have some history there but aside from that, we got back into the area which is in the Northern part of the Birch-Uchi Belt in the Red Lake District and got back in there a couple of years ago through an option on what we now call our North Birch project and that in itself is a project that I staked myself about almost 20 years ago and so I've wanted to drill that since that time. I never got around to it then. These acquisitions are important in the sense that that whole area is really heating up now. There's been a lot of success recently in the Red Lake District itself, Red Lake Belt rather, and it's spilling over into the next Greenstone belt to the east, which is Birch-Uchi.
The advancement of the Springpole deposit by First Mining Gold is really one of the most significant developments there because that's almost 5 million ounces, certainly the largest deposit in the belt and one of the largest undeveloped gold deposits in Canada I believe. They now have a pre-feasibility study on that. So the roads are advancing into that area and opening up the area to exploration and that's one of the things that's held that area back was the lack of access. The Argosy mine is only 10 kilometers from Springpole. It was in production from 1931 to 1952. It only produced a little over a hundred thousand ounces but at a very good grade of almost 13 grams per tonne, but they only went down about 270 meters.
At that time for a fly-in operation it was relatively small and relatively high cost at the time but in this part of the world, these types of deposits can easily go down for a thousand meters or more. So we feel that there's a lot of depth potential at Argosy that's untapped and in our previous drilling going back to 2002 to 2004, we had really just started to prove that. We drilled a few deeper holes that indicated that the mineralization does indeed go beyond the lowest levels of the gold mine. So in picking up that project now, which is only 500 meters, literally, from our North Birch project - the two are very close. So, logistically and geologically, the two compliment each other very well and then being close to Springpole, that whole area is opening up and companies are getting active, and I think it's just a matter of time before people start to make more discoveries up there. So it's an exciting time for the area.
SH:Bob, let’s pivot to an exploration update on the Pamlico Project in Nevada and some of the highlights?
BA: Well, as you mentioned we did get some good drill indications earlier on in the year and we were following that up through the summer. We did do some diamond drilling to try and get some better geological information, however, it was a bit challenging I guess partly through the lack of experienced drillers that we're seeing throughout the industry right now but nonetheless when we put the results out from that program, which was really mainly geared at following up on one hole, some investors I guess didn't like the results or weren't prepared to hang on. The results weren't as good as they'd hoped for and so we saw a bit of a sell off in the stock and it's unfortunate because at the same time as releasing those results, we also announced the fact that what we're seeing at Pamlico is really just a much larger system.
We expanded the geophysics earlier in the year. We expanded the property such that it's now more than 5,700 hectares and we're discovering that there's a lot of copper out there which was something we hadn't fully appreciated before. I think there's significant potential there for a buried porphyry copper deposit and the Pamlico gold district is just part and parcel of a much larger district that encompasses porphyry copper. So, we have a lot to learn yet as to the geological setting, and our guys are sort of going back to basics to some degree because a lot of this expanded land package has never been explored. So we're doing some more mapping and sampling and just trying to better understand the setting and then we'll get back to drilling again but we're already starting to see some very interesting targets developing there.
I think a slight change in focus, but the Pamlico project has taken on a whole new scope and I'm just as excited as ever, maybe more so, as to the potential there. So, I think there's a lot more to come from Pamlico. There's a slight short-term change in focus to Argosy in Northern Ontario that’s largely a function of weather and getting in there to drill in the winter but we're continuing to work on Pamlico, and we’ll be back drilling there again soon.
(President & CEO Bob Archer. Photo courtesy Newrange Gold Corp.)
SH:About a month ago you announced some management changes. Can you give us the details here and what are the positives our investor audience can glean from this?
BA: Well, Bob Carrington retired from the company a few weeks ago and Bob was one of the co-founders of Newrange and built the company up through exploration in Colombia and then transitioned to the US in 2016. He's the one who brought me on as a CEO and as a director and we had talked about this even a couple of years ago and it was likely to happen at some point but the whole pandemic kind of got in the way of all that and we kind of shelved the whole idea for a while because Bob lives in Reno and through the pandemic, when I wasn't able to get to the project at all for about 18 months, it was convenient for Bob to continue running things because he was only a couple of hours from the project.
I continued to look after the capital markets side of things for the company. So once travel restrictions have lifted and I was able to get back down and get more involved in running the project again, then it was a good time and Bob decided that that we were going to make it happen and so he stepped aside, and I've taken on that extra responsibility of president. Now I'll oversee the project as well and we have a project manager on site who's a geologist and two other geologists. There's three guys down there that have been there for more than a year and they're the ones who end up doing most of the field work and so on. So not a huge change.
As I mentioned, this slight change in focus for us at Pamlico from just being very focused on the one gold zone to broadening our scope and taking a look at the bigger picture and the possibility of a district scale copper and copper gold and that sort of thing. All of that had already started to happen anyways because as I mentioned, we had expanded the geophysics and added the extra claims earlier this year. So I'm not necessarily to do things differently and just going to continue with that process but I think in doing that, there was a lot of good things that happened with the project.
SH: Bob, the Company looks set for strong growth in 2022. For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect at your Pamlico and Argosy properties?
BA: I think the most exciting thing Dave is that we'll be starting to drill in January. Winter drilling in Northern Ontario / Northern Canada is very common. As many of your listeners and viewers will know, there are a lot of lakes in that part of the world and sometimes the easiest time to get around, just logistically, is when everything's frozen. In the earlier part of my career, spending 15 years in that part of the world, January to March / April was often our busiest drill season. So we'll be starting to drill on North Birch in January and then continuing at Argosy right after that. We'll just move the drill over from one project to the other because they're right next to each other and just continue to run everything out of the same camp; same crew; same drillers.
It should be an exciting time and we'll be drilling for probably at least two months solid depending on productivity. Then as I said we will be drilling at Pamlico again next year. The timing of that will depend partly on how things go in Ontario but lots of targets being developed there as well. So I think over the first half of 2022 we'll have a pretty significant news flow and some pretty exciting times.
SH:You touched on this a little earlier in the discussion, but I have to mention your stock has been on a bit of a roller coaster ride the past 12 months. What can you tell our investor audience regarding the current valuation of your stock and why you think it’s a good buy right now?
BA: Well, yeah, as I mentioned when the last round of drill results came out, they just didn't meet the expectations of some of the retail investors, I think. So we did see a bit of a sell off the day we put the results out and the following day. I can't blame people. Everybody has their own strategies. Some people have been hanging on for a while or, as I say, certain expectations and so on. So that's fine. That's junior exploration., but I think where the stock is sitting right now and the timing of all of this, because we're coming into tax loss season, but where we sit right now is we're about half of the level that we were just a few months back.
I think the stock is significantly undervalued at the moment particularly with the prospects that we have at all of the projects and the drill programs coming up. So I think it's a great time to accumulate or for new investors to build a position and then we'll get things ramped up in January and then go from there. So I want to say that that's life in junior mining, unfortunately, - the volatility - but I see the gold price is picking up and we need market sentiment to improve a little bit as well, but all things considered, I think there’s lots of upside from here.
SH: And finally, Bob, if there’s anything else that I’ve overlooked that you’d like to add, the floor is all yours.
BA: I think the only thing we didn't really touch on was you know; I mentioned our North Birch project without really any details. I mean, that will be the first project that we drill in January and one of the reasons for that is we had actually planned to drill it this summer. I was in the camp on the property myself for a couple of weeks for what we thought was going to be the start of the drill program but unfortunately, we couldn't line up a helicopter at the time because they were all being seconded for the forest fires in Northwestern Ontario, in the Red Lake region. We had the drill and the drillers on standby, but it just wasn't going to come together and then about a week later, the government issued a work restriction order for anything in that neck of the woods.
You couldn't even operate a chainsaw, let alone a diamond drill. So we had to evacuate the crew and get everybody out of the bush and by the time they rescinded that the drill was up in the Arctic somewhere with the crew and it just wasn't really possible for us to start up again late summer / early fall. At this time of the year everything's starting to freeze up and you really can't access the area anyways until everything is frozen solid, so we basically had to put off the whole program until January. That aside, we've got eight kilometers of a really significant trend there that's never been drilled before. It's what we call an iron formation target - very similar in style to the Musselwhite Mine in Northern Ontario, which is over 8 million ounces, and these deposits can be sizeable. There are other deposits similar to that in the Pickle Lake area to the east and we have gold on the property, the Argosy Mine is very close - a couple of kilometers away. So, certainly there's gold in the area, but our main target for us has never been drill tested. So this will be the first time. So we're really, really looking forward to this and should be an exciting program.
For more details about Newrange Gold Corp., please visit their website at
newrangegold.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.